About Ultrapedia

Ultrapedia is a search engine for recognized (OCR’d) books. So far we have recognised over 50 thousand public domain and out of copyright books.

With Ultrapedia you can search and browse a wealth of historical information including Society Journals, Periodicals, Diaries, Law and Medical Journals, Encyclopaedias and many more – from the 1800s through to 1923.

We have more than 82,000 documents with over 2 million historical characters and distinct entities, some of which we have highlighted in our blog articles.

The Ultrapedia search engine is currently offline, so search queries aren’t returning any results. Site searches are working though, see the search box at the top of the page.

Ultrapedia is one of several projects in work at Secret Studio who are, among other things, experts in digitising all kinds of books and documents. Secret Studio operates one of the worlds largest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Farms. Our servers are fed a steady stream of books in the form of large PDF image files which are processed by the servers in the OCR Farm into Recognised versions of the book or publication.

The OCR technique we employ is very thorough, and uniquely, retains the look and feel of the original written book. This allows the search engine to deliver almost a ?carbon copy? of the original book, and not just a text extract from the original. Optical Character Recognition not only shrinks the size of the books by up to 90%, but it also allows us to create a fully searchable version of the book.

Browsing the library shows a thumbnail of the title page of the book and comprehensive details including book title, author, publisher, genre, ISBN, publisher, no of pages, size of book, summary, editor and format for most of the books.

The site is still officially in beta, which means it works most of the time I guess, but if you like reading old books you might enjoy it. You will have to enter an email address to actually view or download books from the library, but apart from that it is currently open to the public – with no adverts or other visible means of support.

We think you’ll enjoy our site, so please take a moment and discover a new and exciting way to search and browse old books.